This invention relates to a hanger for holding and releasing one or more pieces of limp material such as textile garment pieces either as individual pieces or as groups or stacks of such pieces and for attachment to a conveyor trolley for moving the pieces from work station to work station in a conveyorized garment making plant or the like, and deals more particularly with an improved construction of such a hanger employing one or more fast action grippers for quickly attaching and/or detaching the textile pieces as work is performed on the garment pieces from one work station to the next.
When garment pieces are moved by conveyor trolleys along a track in a garment making plant such as in the environment disclosed in the above-referenced application, operators at respective work stations are assigned to perform a particular operation on the garment piece. The hanger disclosed in the above-referenced application utilizes an axially slidable spring biased circular wedge element rotatably cooperating with a fixed surface on a body supported by the hanger to removably fix the limp material to the hanger. To detach and/or attach a unit of limp material to the hanger in this device, an operator usually must employ both hands to accomplish this operation. That is, the operator usually must utilize one hand to hold steady the hanger and the trolley assembly and must use the other hand to either grasp and subsequently urge the wedge element back against the biasing spring or to pull the garment piece laterally against the rolling engagement of the circular wedge cooperating with the fixed surface of the body. This manual operation can be inefficient and may introduce costly time delays created by the operator as the units of limp material are off-loaded from and/or loaded onto the hanger.
In such a work environment, it is also desirable to attach to the hanger, garment materials such as satin or silk having very thin thicknesses and having very smooth surfaces which are transported from one work station to the next. It has been found, however, that the cooperation between the circular wedge element and the fixed surface of the hanger body disclosed in the above-referenced application can at times be insufficient to positively grip and hold such thin sheets of material formed from fabrics having a smooth texture such as silk, polyester or satin.
Accordingly, the general object of the present invention is to provide a conveyor hanger having at least one gripper capable of being actuated by single hand manipulation for releasably holding in place a unit of work material and being capable of quickly loading and reloading the unit of work material by the single hand actuation of the gripper onto and off of the hanger with an efficiency of movement.
Another object of the invention is to provide an improved gripper having a gripping element having an enhanced gripping capability for gripping a unit of material having a smooth texture onto the hanger.
Yet another object of the invention is to provide a hanger construction readily usable in a conveyor system having a plurality of gripping assemblies supported thereon and each of the assemblies being capable of being readily reoriented on the hanger thereby providing an operator located at a work station with a means for accessing that material initially oriented away from the work station.